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Hungover with apathy, there was no champagne drunk in our household after last night’s theatre of the predictable. Starmer is in power, and the Tories are out. How did our politics become so dull?
Should there have been more dancing in the streets? Possibly. Yet too much had already been said about change and it failed to convince. This was also predictable. If there is a crisis facing our societies today, it is not about who commands the majority; it is a crisis of the political imagination. Presented with manifestos that looked remarkably similar, the choice was really down to who would not fuck it up the most.
I appreciate calling for a better “imagination” may seem rather trite in the contemporary moment. The election is won. And like “solidarity”, it is a word that has been stripped of meaning, often thrown around by those who in the next breath call for the destruction of great works of art. And yet, faced with this meagre offering, my sense is we’re in desperate need of those who put imagination central to their visionary projects. While the promises of better healthcare, policing, and tighter immigration controls is standard fare, who really believes that anything else will change beyond next week? In other words, just like times past when political ideas were facing the same kind of suffocating greyness, we need time to rekindle the spirit of romanticism.
Romanticism is often associated with late-18th to mid-19th-century artists and poets who broke away from the dreariness of classical world views. Often misunderstood, it has nothing to do with some idealistic flight from the world. And it certainly has nothing to do with nostalgia. Searching for a deeper appreciation of the senses, the romantics insisted on the need to reimagine all the fundamental categories for society, including how we see life, how we encounter nature, and how we respond to changes in an increasingly globalising world.
While frequently associated with the pioneering writings of Wordsworth, Byron, Keats and Shelley, the tradition started much earlier in Florentine Europe. If romanticism is about facing the tragedy of existence, confronting its horrors, yet still finding new reasons to believe in the world, these elements are all apparent in the most magnificent poem ever written, Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy.
Not only did Dante’s intervention have a profound impact on how we understand the relationships among perpetrators, victims and witnesses of violence — he literally invented what Hell looked like. The poet offers us a number of important lessons as we consider the state of politics today. Dante doesn’t turn away from the intolerable conditions faced by the wretched of the earth. Rather, he slowly observes them, and asks questions of Virgil, his educated guide. Dante is a student who doesn’t have ready-made paradigms or solutions to the ills he witnesses, nor does he seek to pass judgment without knowing the context.
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SubscribeIf the twentieth century has taught us anything, it’s that the last thing you want running your country is a bunch of leftwing romantics.
Or right wing romantics for that matter.
or indeed any romantics of whatever hue.
This article is about fifteen years out of date. Higher Education, the Arts and most cultural institutions have since been captured by racist, misogynistic Maoism. The last thing our country needs is for today’s f***ed up visionaries to have more power than they already do. Invoking the spirits of Dante and Blake is an insult to the memory of these great dead white men who are now seen as controversial to teach (thanks to their race, sex, religion and by virtue of being western in the west).
Our universities over produce graduates, at great expense, many of whom will never find a use for the knowledge they gained while there. We therefore need to limit those who do study for a degree to those who will benefit themselves and society.
There will still be wealthy arts students who can pay their own way, and there would be grants or scholarships for those less well off, but who show talent.
We need to accept that a degree isn’t for everybody, and that we need plumbers, electricians, mechanics, carpenters, etc. and fund and respect those careers appropriately.
I don’t wholly disagree. Of course we need plumbers etc. But there is something very gradgrind about your vision of the future. Is that all we can expect of the British genius – that we kept the lights on and the water running.
Reading this eloquent plea for another kind of politics, I recall a distinction made by the French writer Charles Peguy (1873-1914). Peguy, reached the` academic heights from the poorest background when he won a place in the Ecole Normale. His academic progress was disrupted by his political activism; a socialist, a nationalist, and above all an ardent Dreyfusard. He won the admiration of his socialist colleagues and with it the possibility of career as journal editor. But he broke with socialists. They had, he claimed, abandoned ‘Mystique’ for ‘Politique’. Mystique provided the motive and intellectual resources to defend Dreyfus with its ideal of a French Republic. The socialists gave up on the ideal for the pursuit of power for its own sake.
Looking at the election from the neighbouring isle, am I correct in noting a regular complaint, so well exemplified in this piece, at the absence of vision? Voters were not invited to put their particular interests in the context of a general interest. All politique, no mystique.
Peguy did not just make the distinction; he examined in depth how the ways history was told, society studied, philosophy presented frustrated the search for mystique.
He deserves attention.
On my reading list for a while.
I don’t want to underestimate the importance of material wealth and the practicalities of life – but we do need to get beyond a vision of the future centred simply on how we share out the booty.
And he got elected, so his behaviour perhaps tells us more about ourselves as an electorate than it does about Starmer as a man. We want our politicians to be honest, until they are ….
If the twentieth century has taught us anything it is to be suspicious of grand all encompassing visions.
At the same time, the author is right that without some sort of vision the country (the west?) feels directionless – fated to just accept whatever the free market, and technology, turns up. Many of the most important things in our lives seem to sit outside democratic control, with AI being just the latest.
From Thatcher on through Blair and beyond there has been no clear vision of what we as a people want Britain to be like in the future – unless it’s that everyone, gay, trans, black, white, will all be variants of a kind of lower middle class clone. Even that one has gone of the rails with rising house prices.
Meanwhile our woke morality consists of the dregs of a former vision, a socialist one, with all the important stuff about social class removed and replaced with childish sentimentality and whining. Adopted now as the preferred values scheme of the rich and privileged.
So we do need a vision – one that has learned from the past, which is less hubristic, less obsessed with every petty inequality, more concerned with the big stuff – and creates a sense of meaning and direction in a country which has lost it.
We can expect no vision at all from a man who gets down on his knees in obeisance to marxist identity cults, thinks women can have penises, and believes supranational organisation should have sovereignty over the UK.